He makes his coffee, drinks his orange juice, kisses his wife on the cheek, makes two scrambled eggs and eats them while exchanging sleepy early-morning talk with his girls, says to his wife,
“Those countertops? I’ve been thinking. We can afford them.”
“Really? You sure?”
“Yeah, why not? You only live once.”
He finishes his breakfast, says goodbye, gets into his car, says hi to the neighbor who is getting into his car, and joins the other pilgrims in the commuter-hour snarl on I-15 South.
It’s a pisser.
You sell your soul and no one even notices.
Not even you.
115
Judas took the thirty pieces of silver, but
Would Jesus?
If he’d been made the offer?
And if Judas was worth thirty, Jesus had to be worth, what Three hundred, easy.
Just sayin’.
Anyway, history shows that
They bought the wrong Jew.
116
Ben is not going to make the same mistake.
Ben is a careful consumer-O can tell you stories about Ben driving her crazy spending weeks trying to decide which flat-screen TV to buy, debating the relative merits of Samsung and Sony-but there is no Consumer Reports on Drug Cops.
He knows he has to trump the county level. The next obvious choice would be a state cop, but Ben takes the long view-if he comes up with a state cop he leaves room on the board for OGR to jump him.
(“King me.”)
So what he needs is a fed.
Not easy, not easy.
For one thing, the feds are notoriously honest.
(Chon would object to the pairing of “notoriously” with “honest,” but he’s in Afghanistan, so fuck him.)
Two, the feds are also notoriously paranoid (clears with Chon) always checking on each other, and
Three, Ben has no clue how to approach a fed, or
Four
Which fed to try.
He’s walking on the beach pondering this dilemma when he sees a fisherman jam a small fish on his hook and then cast it deep in the water.
117
You can Google anything.
You can even Google a federal drug agent.
What Ben does is he goes on Google and enters
“Federal Drug Busts+California” and gets three million twenty thousand hits.
Your tax dollars at work.
He scrolls through, rejects most of them, and then he hits
“Massive Marijuana Seizure in Jamul.”
Sees a photo of triumphant narcs standing beside bales of ditch weed and a story about this being a massive blow against the Sanchez-Lauter Cartel, the “massive blow” quote coming from a DEA agent named Dennis Cain, who has a particular look of triumphalism (“Mission accomplished”) on his grille.
Dennis, Ben decides, looks like a candidate.
Ambiguity intentional.
118
Ben gets on a pay phone and waits for Special Agent Dennis Cain to answer. When he does, Ben says simply, “5782 Terra Vista in Modjeska Canyon. Grow house. Premium hydro.”
“Who is this?”
“You want it or not?”
“Can you repeat the information?”
“Come on. The call is recorded.”
Ben clicks out.
Then he calls his grower at 5782 Terra Vista in Modjeska Canyon.
“Bail.”
“What?”
“Bail,” Ben repeats. “Take as much of the good shit as you can get into your car and leave the rest. Do it now, Kev.”
119
Dennis listens to the recording, doesn’t recognize the voice.
He’s not big on anonymous sources.
Usually it’s a practical joke, someone trying to harass an exgirlfriend or wife, or it’s a new player. Tracking the call, he finds out it came from a pay phone at John Wayne Airport. He thinks about giving it to the OC Task Force, let them waste their time, but it’s a slow day so he decides it’s worth a ride up to Orange County to check it out. Always a nice drive along the ocean up through Camp Pendleton, and he feels like getting out of the office, so what the hell.
The anonymous source proves to be pure gold.
Well, pure marijuana.
120
Ben waits for ten days and then hits him again, this time from the Amtrak station in downtown San Diego.
